Posts Tagged ‘hershey chocolates’

It started in 2005 on Halloween night when I saw that my trick-or-treat bucket was mainly filled up with Hershey kisses. I only knew of one flavor… the original milk chocolate. Then I started thinking of all of the flavors of kisses that the Hershey Company could make.

I discovered that there were Hershey’s kisses with different wrappers as I dug deeper down into my bucket. I had gotten about four kisses with different wrappers. I soon found out that the different wrapper colors stood for different flavors. I decided to start collecting them, so I went down the candy aisle every time I went to the store, and I still do that today.

This is how I now have 59 different varieties of kisses and a website (www.lauracarey.com/kisses) with a photo and information of every kiss I’ve gathered in my collection. I’ve gone from having no idea what different wrappers stood for to being recognized in articles from all around the world! I’ve been in newspaper articles from Israel to Dallas, and many from my hometown. People have emailed me about my website from nearly all over the world, even as far away as Australia!

It’s always a good time to start collecting Hershey’s Kisses because you can find candy from ‘The Sweetest Place on Earth’ almost anywhere in the world and because Hershey’s Corporation manufactures new kisses all the time. What you don’t want to do to start off your collection is run out to the store and buy a bag of every single different kiss you see.

That’s what I did and low and behold five years later I still see those same kisses in stores every day. There are six types of kisses that will probably never be discontinued. These kisses are the Original Milk Chocolate, Dark Chocolate, Hugs, Milk Chocolate with Almonds, Caramel, and Cherry Cordial.

The types of kisses you want to look out for are the ones for sale around the holidays. These are almost always Limited Edition and don’t always come back the next year. Here’s a list of the holiday Limited Edition kisses that I’ve seen in the past…

The Zero Bar is a candy with a long history as it was first introduced in the 1930's by Hollywood Candy Company but it now owned by Hershey Foods. This wrapper , circa early 1930's, is very rare as it shows a Polar Bear!

The Zero Bar is not your average candy bar as it is a candy with a history spanning over 70 years!

It was first introduced in the 1920’s by the now defunct Hollywood Brands Candy Company and is now owned by Hershey Foods although this transition took place over many years and included many owners in between.

The candy bar is unique in that it consists of a delicious amalgamation of almonds, peanuts and caramel nougat covered, or shall we say , drenched, with delicious white fudge. This was even more controversial upon its release as most candy bars then, as now, are coated in milk chocolate.

As per the name, this has been the subject of candy lore as it was not touted as a reduced calorie candy bar – hence the name Zero – but rather because the white coating was supposed to give the impression of snow and, metaphorically speaking, “cool as zero degrees”

The original wrapper had a Polar Bear on it and upon it’s initial release, was called Double Zero. It wasn’t until 1934 that it formally became known as the Zero Bar

The original Zero Bars were distributed in the summer as fudge has a much higher melting point than milk chocolate and, as there wasn’t air conditioning readily available when the bar was first released; retailers stored this in their refrigerators.

Yes, this candy bar like others will melt if exposed to high temperatures but there is something intriguing about this bar that makes it endure as a classic if only because it is delicious and holds true to it’s original formula and because it is over 70 years old!

PS: The vintage Zero Bar wrapper pictured above is VERY rare as it shows the Polar Bear! This is circa early 1930’s

A rare vintage Heath Bar Wrapper from the 1960's when the candy was being distributed by the now defunct CB Heath & Sons in Illinois

Sharability: 2

Denture Danger: 8

Convenience: 6

Novelty: 8

Overall: 9

Heath bar… a delightfully sweet and cruncharific candy bar. Super sweet English toffee with a hint of almonds coated in milk chocolate for the candy that will demand you to finish it.

Toffee is toffee and toffee will get stuck in your teeth, but it won’t stop you from enjoying every sugary mouth watering bite of this thin candy bar.

In 1914 L.S. Heath opened a confectionary store in Illinois. His sons, Bayard and Everett Heath, ran the store and perfected the Heath toffee bar recipe in 1928; by 1932 the bar was on the market. The Heath bar was made fully by hand for ten years until the company modernized its plant.

The Heath brothers came up with a great marketing scheme in which they made the candy bar available for delivery via Heath dairy trucks along with milk and cottage cheese. This marketing idea must have worked better than the one that marketed the bar as healthy: “Heath for better health!”

I just don’t think there is and chocolate covered toffee bar out there that can actually be considered healthy. The Heath bar was another candy bar that the government had distributed to the military during World War II. Leaf North American Confectionary bought Heath in 1989 and Hershey took that over in 1996.

“Give me a break, give me a break, break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar!” When I was a kid I always replaced “bar” in that song with “cake,” I just thought the rhyme was necessary.

The Kit Kat is a crispy wafer covered in milk chocolate. This is one of those candies that I always forget how good it is until I take a bite and then I just can’t stop munching. With the melty chocolate and the crunchy wafer it is just too good. Sometimes I like to bite the chocolate off from around the wafer and then bite the layers off of the wafer; it makes it last a little longer that way.

The idea for the Kit Kat bar originated from a in a suggestion box response at the Rowntree factory that recommended a snack that a ‘man could have in his lunch box for work.’ Thus the Chocolate Crisp was produced by Rowntree in 1935.

In 1937 it became Kit Kat Chocolate Crisp and became Kit Kat after WWII. The name came from the KitKat club, which was a political/literary club in the 18th century. Rowntree was bought by Nestlé in 1988, and is now produced by Nestlé worldwide. The United States is too good to be like the rest of the world and instead has the Hershey Company producing the Kit Kat bars.

Fun Kit Kat Facts:
– Kit Kat was the number one selling biscuit in the UK last year selling over one billion Kit Kats.
– Kit Kats have not always been recognized by their red wrapper. During WWII there were milk shortages and the Kit Kat was made with dark chocolate and wore a blue wrapper.
– Kit Kat made the 1997 Guinness Book of World Records by selling 13.2 billion Kit Kats worldwide in 1995.